Islamic Republic's attacks on Persian Gulf water and power facilities were deliberate

The Islamic Republic's and its proxy groups' drone and missile attacks on water, power and energy facilities in the Persian Gulf countries since the start of the war on 28 February were deliberate and carried out with a precision that refutes the official account of "shrapnel from intercepted missiles falling". This is the conclusion of an extensive investigation by the Reuters news agency, published on Thursday, 15 October 2026.

The investigation documents at least 135 drone and missile attacks on at least 84 infrastructure sites in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Iraq, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain, from desalination plants and power stations to refineries, airports and even a nuclear power plant. Reuters reached these findings on the basis of 36 interviews, images and satellite data. Regional governments had attributed the damage to interceptor shrapnel in at least 34 statements, but 14 experts who examined the images, including 11 experts from the affected industries, considered this explanation highly unlikely and pointed to signs of deliberate explosions and to the importance of the targets.

Kuwait's desalination plants and the Barakah nuclear plant

Kuwait gets about 90 percent of its drinking water from desalination plants, most of them connected to coastal power stations. According to Reuters' findings, at least four of the country's eight combined power and desalination plants were hit between 2 March and 20 July, some more than once. Michael Christopher Low, director of the Middle East Center at the University of Utah, has warned that attacking enough of this capacity could leave Kuwait without water within days or weeks.

In the UAE, a drone struck an electrical substation about 130 metres from one of the reactors of the Barakah nuclear power plant on 17 May, and according to the International Atomic Energy Agency one of the four reactors was switched to emergency diesel generators. Rafael Grossi, the agency's director general, said that whoever was behind the attack knew exactly what they were doing. The oil port of Fujairah was also hit at least 19 times.

Saudi refineries and Qatar's gas

According to the investigation, five of Saudi Arabia's nine large refineries were damaged, and their output fell from more than 10 million barrels a day to less than 7 million. An attack on 10 September on pumping stations of Saudi Arabia's East-West pipeline halted the flow of crude to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, three days after Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of the Islamic Republic's parliament, had written on X that the region's oil and gas production chain was extensive, accessible and vulnerable. In Qatar, two cooling units at Ras Laffan, from which nearly a fifth of the world's liquefied gas is exported, were knocked out, and according to QatarEnergy repairing them will take three to five years. Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, has said all the targets were civilian.

These findings are consistent with DIAR's earlier reports on attacks on Saudi Arabia by the Houthis, allies of the Islamic Republic and the sinking of ships in the Strait of Hormuz, and they show that the Islamic Republic knowingly targeted the region's vital civilian infrastructure, something the Geneva Conventions prohibit for facilities essential to the survival of the civilian population.

At least 135 attacks on 84 infrastructure sites in seven countries of the region; the aim was to damage civilian life.